1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to management of a gaming event, and more particularly, to management of gaming events that include complex arrangements of interdependent sub-events of varying types.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic gaming has become a significant industry with the development of computer and media technology. In particular, online gaming, which allows remotely located players to interact or compete in an electronic gaming environment or gaming community, has grown in popularity with the development of the Internet and networking technologies.
The interaction between players in online gaming is not limited to playing with, or against, each other in a single instance of an electronic game. For instance, players can interact with each other in gaming tournaments, which require players to play a series of instances of an electronic game. As such, gaming tournaments constitute gaming events that are made of a series of sub-events, where each sub-event corresponds with one instance of an electronic game.
In many cases, the arrangement of sub-events in a tournament involves a simple single-elimination system where the players are paired in head-to-head competition in each round. The losers in each round are eliminated from the tournament, and the winners advance to be paired with each other in the next round. The field of players is halved in each round until a single winner emerges. The prerequisite for playing in a particular round is outscoring one's opponent in all prior rounds. After the initial round, the occurrence of a particular sub-event in a round merely depends on the outcome of two sub-events in the previous round, as the winners of the two previous sub-events advance to play each other. In a single-elimination system, the interdependence between the individual gaming events is straightforward. The pool of participating players is easy to track, and setting up the individual sub-events is simple. As a result, the complexities of managing the tournament are minimized.
Managing a tournament is further simplified by having the players in every individual gaming event play the same electronic game. In this way, all players in the tournament are simply evaluated according to the same set of rules. In particular, there is no requirement to account for disparate scoring systems. Furthermore, complexity is also reduced when the electronic games are executed on servers that are compatible with a particular network and are able to communicate the outcomes of the sub-events with each other and set up subsequent sub-events.
Although other tournament formats for online electronic gaming may exist, the formats are simple and the variety of formats remains limited due to an inadequate capability to manage more complex arrangements and dependencies.